We’ve made it!  For the past several essays we’ve been on a journey discussing personal growth.  Making change stick is a very difficult and long process, requiring real commitment.  But before we could tackle the subject of Commitment, we had to first discuss Authenticity, Vulnerability and Priorities.  Your own commitment to this journey (or is it persistence?) has finally paid off!  At least, I hope it will.  I was talking with Trish the other day about my writing process.  Sometimes, I write an essay almost totally in my head and it comes out on paper with very little effort or editing.  Sometimes I have a bullet list of points I want to make or stories I want to tell and I work off of that outline when I sit down to type.  And sometimes, like with this topic, I have the topic alone when I sit down and have no idea what might come out.  I’m as interested as you are to see how I’ll tackle this subject!  To be honest, these often become my favorite essays because I really learn something about myself or find new ways of articulating a concept that brings me clarity.  And these days, clarity on anything is a good thing.

I’ve been using the example of my recent weight loss journey to illustrate the difficulties in creating real change within yourself.  It’s an example that most people can connect with and one that has been on my mind constantly since I started the journey (with intention) on New Year’s Day of this year.  In fact, that is part of the commitment process: keeping the topic front and center.  Our family and friends can certainly attest to our keeping this topic front and center!  I am acutely aware of how often something regarding weight loss and food works its way into most conversations we have.  Let me take this opportunity to apologize, then, for talking your ears off about this (since family and friends make up the bulk of my very patient readership).

In the previous essays in this series, we discussed that you can’t create lasting change until you get to real commitment.  You can’t get to real commitment until you honestly assess your priorities and ensure that they are aligned with your commitment.  You also cannot honestly assess and then change your priorities until you can be honest with yourself about what your priorities truly are, as shown by your actions.  Once all that is lined up, you need to take a few minutes to differentiate in your mind “will power” vs. “commitment”.  I touched on this earlier, but it deserves a bit more air time.  Will Power is involved when you choose not to have a third piece of pizza on Friday night.  Commitment is involved when you choose not to have pizza every Friday night, but to make it an occasional treat.  Will Power is involved when you choose to not honk and flip a finger at the idiot who just cut you off.  Commitment is involved when you choose to almost always recognize that while that person may indeed just be an idiot, they also may have honestly not seen you or are preoccupied by a serious issue in their family or just need a little grace—so you take a breath and ease off the gas.  Will Power is staying at work late to finish a project that got away from you.  Commitment is making a more regular effort at planning so that it becomes rare for that to happen.  In short, Will Power is short term effort that gets you a prize but has a defined time limit.  Will Power is holding your breath.  Commitment is an ongoing effort, made consciously such that the effort becomes habit, to create the prize of permanent change.  The process of Commitment will certainly require Will Power now and then.  Reliance on Will Power without an eye on Commitment will just burn you out.  Unfortunately, our American culture does not help us here.  We reward Heroic Effort that Solves a Big Problem (Will Power) instead of Steady Excellence that Keeps Big Problems from Happening to Begin With (Commitment).

So let’s go back to weight loss.  Many people choose some sort of restriction diet to lose weight.  If they have sufficient will power, the weight will come off.  But without the recognition of, and changing of, whatever the habits were that put the weight on, we all know what will happen: once you relax the requirement for will power and allow the return to previous habits, the weight comes back.  Now that I have reached my goal weight, my journey is not over.  It will never be over.  And that’s because the goal was not really weight loss.  The goal was to change my relationship with food so that I stay at a healthy weight.  Weight loss was part of the benefits of the initial stages of the journey.  I smile when people congratulate me on reaching my goal weight and then say, “Now you just need to keep it off!”  They say this as if the hard part was the weight loss.  The hard part is just starting:   making sure these new habits that led to the weight loss actually stick.  The hard part is the commitment, but the hard work was around embracing reordered priorities.  Of course, this whole process is applicable well beyond weight loss.  Whether you are examining your job or a relationship or how you handle money or how you keep your house, the process to create lasting change is the same.  Keep being honest with yourself; keep assessing your actions against your priorities; continually recommit to those priorities, and the commitment to lasting change will be there. 

I started this essay series just after I reached my weight loss goal.  As of this writing, I have maintained that goal weight for six weeks (even lost a couple more pounds) and earned my Lifetime Membership in Weight Watchers.  Yes, that’s awesome and I’m very proud of myself (and of Trish, since we are on this journey together) but my sense is that now the real work begins.  What gives me hope is that I don’t feel deprived, that I really enjoy how we eat now.  We have “treat nights” when we ignore the points and just enjoy “less nutrient dense” foods because they taste good, but now I really want those point excursions to be worth it!  That food had better taste good!  And, honestly, my body craves the more nutrient dense diet the next day.  But I also know how easy it is to slip into unhealthy habits because Big Food has created a really unhealthy ecosystem all around us.  It actually pisses me off that I had to become a person of leisure and means to create a healthy lifestyle and that it takes incredible conscious effort to maintain it.  Everything from highly processed foods in the grocery stores and overly engineered produce and meats designed for shelf life and low cost instead of nutrition, to the size of and what’s in fast food and restaurant meals have normalized a diet that is killing us.  So, I’ve got one more essay in me on this whole topic:  the danger of accepting normalization of “bad things” and the need to fight back on that acceptance!  Stay tuned for a rant next time!